


all (and only) he is

by hallowgirl



Category: thirteen (2003)
Genre: Childhood, Coming-of-age, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Family Angst, Gen, Growing Up, Loss of Innocence, protective brother, sibling angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 13:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8164049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hallowgirl/pseuds/hallowgirl
Summary: The thing is, he's just her brother.





	

**Author's Note:**

> An edited version of a fic I posted a few years ago. I take fanfiction commissions over on [Tumblr](http://hallowgirl.tumblr.com/post/148008226239/fanfic-commissions) (it's a lolitics Tumblr, but I take fanfic commissions for multiple fandoms. ) Leave a comment if you like it!

The thing is, he's just her brother.

Mason's always known that. Tracey's his little sister, and that means she fucking winds him up, and they scream at each other and if anyone shoves her in the corridor at school, it's his job to shove them back. He's her brother.

But that's all he is.

And this is something he can't stop.

It doesn't matter if Tracey's drinking every three hours, 'til she's staggering around looking like some junkie from the street corners. It doesn't matter if she's sneaking out with Evie Zamora to snort coke in the kids' playground. It doesn't matter if she's dressing up 'til she looks like a fucking prostitute and then parading round downtown, leaning on thirty-something-year-old's shoulders and sticking cigarettes in her mouth.

It doesn't matter if he hates the fact she does it, hates watching her turn into some fucking strung-out doll, some permanently trashed junkie who staggers around with mascara-smeared eyes and that too-wide smile, someone who keeps her sleeves yanked down over her wrists, someone whose lipstick stains her mouth like blood. He's still only her brother.

And Mason's always known that no matter what, there's nothing he can do about it.

He knows that Mom's freaked out about everything, that she's been freaked out secretly since the day months ago-Christ, it seems so much longer-when Tracey chucked her old Barbies in the trash, when Tracey dumped half of her old clothes and announced she needed a new wardrobe. He knows that Mom didn't want Tracey at Evie's, so Evie came here. And OK, when Evie Zamora was dancing around outside his window, yanking her shirt up, grinning at him, he might have gone along with it. Because it was Evie Zamora, for Christ's sake.

And it was OK for her to be that way because she was nothing to do with him. He might want her to be, for five minutes or something, but she wasn't and he knew that.

But Tracey was, and Tracey wasn't like Evie. Or at least, she shouldn't have been.

Over the past few months, it's been like watching the sister he knew-the kid with the pigtails, the kid who scribbled poetry in her notebooks, the kid who brought home straight As, the kid who was always hanging around him, _the kid, the kid, the kid_ -get sucked away. Not just vanish, get sucked _out,_ like someone else has moved into her body, some fucking too-young temptress with a hole through her tongue and her panties showing, some pierced body with smoke curling out her lips and no memory of yesterday or the day before or the day before that.

And he watches and he yells at her, and when he sees her downtown with some thong designed for fucking thirty year olds trying to bag a husband sticking out of her jeans, he tells their mom, but what the hell else is he going to do?

Until now, Mason Freeland has coasted. Not a straight A student. Not the top athlete. Not even the average trouble making kid. Just a nice kid, he guessed some people would say. Yeah, maybe he looks at a little too much porn, maybe he smokes a little too much pot, but mostly, a normal kid. Nothing much.

Tracey's always been the little kid in the family, the little sister, the one to protect. And she'd just been there, and he hadn't really paid much attention to that.

But now, faced with this stranger in a crop top, nails streaked black, stud glittering in between her lips, he thinks he'd take the pigtailed kid who wrote poems any day.

Thinking about it, he always kind of assumed Tracey would do something. Doesn't know how, just assumed it. She was a straight A kid, she wrote all the time. He kind of assumed she'd do something, be an author or something. Go to college. All the stuff his mom got on his case about. Because up until recently, he was the biggest worry to her, his grades, a straight-C average that could get picked up, a too-short attention span, not enough interest in homework.

But now, he's been shunted aside and Tracey's taken the spot of Problem Kid. But to be honest, Mason'd rather still be in that spot. At least that's something he fucking _knows._

He'd take the nagging from his mom and the yelling from his teachers if it meant Tracey would go back to whining at them to read something she'd written or trying to hang around his friends, her hair pulled into pigtails that bounce when she walks. Just if she'd stop sneaking out and getting high would be a start, for Christ's sake.

And Mason knows that Mom's freaked to all hell. Christ, she's been thinking about calling their _dad._

(Their fucking dad, the one who's too busy to take them every weekend, whose life piles up with work, work, work, and this is the last weekend, the last one, the last time he'll have to blow them off, this is the last weekend, he swears)

And he shrugs and says it's just a phase and his sister'll be fine, of course she'll be fine, it's his sister, it's not possible that she won't be fine.

But there's nothing else he can say.

Sometimes, when Mason's down at the beach with his surf board, or sitting at his computer or just slumped with his friends in front of the TV, he finds himself thinking of Tracey. When he's watching her stand and scream in the kitchen, or smash her way through a door, or twine her arms around some scumbag's neck, all he wants to do is march over.

He wants to _drag her away, scream in her face_ , _shut up, sit down, stop drinking, stop smoking, stop, stop, stop._

He wants to.

But he never does.

Because why would she listen to him?

It's not like he's _their dad, squeaky clean, perfect_.

So why the hell would she listen?

He still wants to drag her home, to pull the cigarettes out of her hands and throw them out the window, to smash every bottle she drinks from. Take a flannel and rub the stains from her face. See her skin again, her eyes looking back out at him.

Wipe away the lines on her arms, the scabs etched into her skin, the scars carved into her flesh that won't vanish, no matter how long she covers her arms for.

(He knows they're there, he sees the blood on her clothes.)

(He can't say it, he can't, because doesn't she have enough problems and who the hell wants to say that out loud, anyway?)

Mason can still remember his sister when she was a little girl, running after him, pigtails flying behind her head.

Her eyes, blinking up at him, as she nicked fries from his plate. The way she used to like him to read stories to her, tucked up in bed. Her giggle, a bright ribbon trailing out of her mouth high and sweet in the air, before Dad came in to turn off the light.

When he looks at her, there's leather jackets and crop tops, rings shoved through her belly button, and coke burning up her nose, cigarettes blackening her mouth.

(Her eyes, _dead, dead eyes)_

eyes staring out like they're asking for something

Asking for help.

Like someone who's already given up. Like someone who's lying back on life and letting herself be washed away, because why's she good for anything else.

Those eyes that whisper-scream _Help me, help me, help me._

He could grab her hand and pull her out.

(Even if she never thanked him. Even if she never looked at him again. Even if she never spoke another word to him.)

He doesn't.

Instead, he turns back to the computer screen and stares back down at the surfboard, and closes his eyes and tries to pretend that the whole thing doesn't exist. That it's just a nightmare. A nightmare, that's bad while it lasts, but that will be over soon.

_(Over soon, they're all over soon)_

He's only

_(only?)_

her brother.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment if you like it. :)


End file.
